Palakkad-Based Artist Vimal Chandran Reimagines Characters From Kerala Folklore In A Sci-Fi Setting For His New Digital Series, Drawn From A Child’s Perspective
It is sort of a half-remembered dream. A sickle-wielding oracle, a school-going boy, a cluster of areca nut timber and leaping roosters on both facet. Artist Vimal Chandran plucks reminiscences from a childhood in Palakkad and locations them in a world the place extra-terrestrial creatures rise from the seas and descend from the skies.
When the pandemic hit final yr and Vimal moved from Bengaluru again to his hometown in Kerala, he was reacquainted, after a break of 15 years, with village folklore, myths, temple characters and superstitions he had heard as a baby. These vivid visuals creep into his ongoing artwork collection, Folk SciFi.
“I am reimagining characters from our native traditions in a Science Fiction environment. These are unreal stories about real people in real places,” he says.
The artworks are 12-second animations, blinking like glitches within the matrix to ominous music. The colors — dreamy and surreal — keep within the spectrum of blues and greys.
In The Visit, Vimal tells the story of Pootham, a poltergeist who goes from home to accommodate searching for somewhat boy he has change into hooked up to. Performing artistes in Kerala enact this character, visiting houses in villages after the summer time harvest, and it’s the reminiscence of assembly one such ‘Pootham’ on a summer time night by the river Nila that Vimal captures.
In his rendition, the Pootham hovers miles above the boy and his mom, as if damaged away from a passing UFO. This perspective — of a big legendary creature gazing down on a baby — carries ahead in all of the works; whether or not it’s the monumental picket horses of Kuthira Vela or the character of Darike, from the standard theatrical battle between Darike and Kali. “As a child, these characters would seem scary and fascinating to me at the same time. There was always a certain level of apprehension seeing their painted faces and unusual appearances but at the same time they were so vibrant and majestic that I could not stop looking at them,” he says.
Vimal brings again these reminiscences within the type of magic realism, clubbing it along with his curiosity in sci-fi — one thing that bloomed as he fell in love with the Russian journal Misha in a communist-leaning Kerala of the Eighties and ‘90s.
Four of the seven artworks have been launched and offered thus far, as NFTs, on WazirX market. “I wanted to tell unique stories from my native land, stories that have been passed down for generations,” says Vimal. “These are 4,000-year-old tales on the blockchain for the first time, and that is interesting to me because once up there, they will live forever.”
A giant believer within the NFT area, he says that creating an NFT makes it simpler to tokenise and promote genuine copies of his digital art work. “I am not limited by the 2D canvas, I can explore animations and sound, and collaborate with different artistes. Also, traditionally, I would not have had control over my artwork once I sold it. But this way, I can track the secondary sales too and get royalty for it each time,” he says. “Whoever has started investing in it, is already ahead of the curve.”
